


Toll Due, Bad Dream Come True

by 1nsomnizac



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28748775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1nsomnizac/pseuds/1nsomnizac
Summary: Jade English knows why The Condesce is here, and she knows how it's going to end. But there's many ways to die, and Jade thinks she can get it her way.
Relationships: The Condesce & Grandma English | Alpha Jade Harley
Kudos: 7





	Toll Due, Bad Dream Come True

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to the song 'Them Bones' by Alice In Chains, which helped inspire this fic.

You aren’t dozing off, just resting your eyes a little, when your PDA beeps. The volume is startling. You could lower the volume, but it is probably better to keep it loud. Your ears aren’t performing like they did in the forties.

It’s Jake. He sent you a picture he took of one of the little fairy bulls that flit around on the mountainside near the house. Unlike most of Jake’s photos, this one comes out very well. The fairy bull is in focus! You congratulate him on the nice picture and he asks you what you want him to prepare for dinner. This month, the only vegetables he wants to eat are carrots and potatoes, and he complains about every food that doesn’t go well with barbecue sauce. But then, he thinks barbecue sauce goes with things you could never imagine eating with barbecue sauce, so who knows what that boy wants to eat. You feel like maybe it is time to take the kid on a culinary adventure, and tell him to get a jar of curry sauce out of the pantry, along with a list of vegetables. You wonder if you still remember how to make tandoori naan with the newfangled breadmaker that Strider sent you. “This was the granniest gift I could think of. Happy Birthday. Love, Dave.” Always a fun little game to figure out the actual sentiment behind the cool, detached affect. 

You stretch and make your way out of the entrance to the weathered stone temple. There is beauty in the ruins. The blocks of basalt that once set on a square have shifted a little over the years, the once firm edges have eroded into organic curves, the black stone stained and painted green by flora and fungi.

The sun is on its way down. When the sky gets this color, you know it’s time to head back home, because you’ll be caught out in the dark otherwise. You look back at your PDA to discover that it is later than you expected. It’s been this dark for about half an hour, which means night will fall about five minutes before you get back, meaning it will take you fifteen minutes navigating that goddamn slope in the dark.

You start a message to let Jake know, but the device loses the signal. No bars. Your last message to him failed to send. Phooey. And after all that money getting a dedicated satellite.

You set off, worrying about Jake while you walk. He knows how to feed himself without you, but he is a kind little boy who always wants to eat together with his grandma. He might even look for you if you are out too late, little hero he is. He saw that little almost-fall you had a month ago and it seemed to put the fear in him. And he’s still too small to defend himself from some of the bigger monsters, even if he has taken to the gun very well for a boy his age.

You look towards home. A shape sits in the sky behind and above it, too far to make out details. An aircraft and a signal loss? You don’t think that’s coincidence. You swap out your close-up glasses for far-off glasses, and look again. The craft sits in the sky, sits in the sky like nothing made by human hands, its color too hard to see, dark with distance, but you can make out its shape, a shape that one psychic young lady prophesied you would see before you die. A craft with prongs like the head of a fork. 

Your heart falls. For a moment, the world is silent to your old ears. You no longer hear the whispers of the grass these days.

You let out a breath. You tell yourself that you knew this day would come. You made war upon her, and one day she would take assassinating you seriously. When you were young, you wanted to go down fighting, rifle in hand, hot and fierce like the hatred that burned in your blood. When you were twenty. When you were forty. When you were sixty, even. 

You are ninety years old now, up against an immortal several millennia old, and somehow that course of action feels less like a final defiance and more like making a fool of yourself. When did that happen?

You want to see Jake again one more time before she kills you. With that goal in mind, you stride forward to meet the Witch.

It takes a while to get anywhere nowadays. You remember those long legged days of youth, running circles ‘round the coppers, climbing the mountains and trekking the deserts of the world in the search of game constructs. You were still in fighting fit when you first encountered young Mister Strider and Miss Lalonde, frightfully young, the both of them, but you have had a long life, a longer life than both of them will get to live if Rose is right, and it has worn your knees down quite a bit and made it quite hard to maintain the sort of muscle mass you need to keep up an active lifestyle. You can feel the joints in your toes after a few minutes of walking, but how often have you really used your toes in your life? Quite unfair.

The jungle is never quiet, but it all feels dim and distant. Birds nest in the canopy, making perpetual noise. Crabdads scout between the trees, and the double mouth cats do their hunting in the fading light. You have taught them to stay off the path with repeated lead rebukes, and have your trusty rifle on its strap on your shoulder to reinforce the lesson if need be.

But then they do go quiet, giving you a minute's warning. The sun is starting to set, turning the sky a purple color.

She’s standing there when you round a bend, about halfway home. She leans on her binatrident. You inspect it, but thankfully there is no blood running from it.

Yet.

She towers, closer to ten feet tall than nine, and her tall curved horns bump her profile up to twice your youthful height. You’ve gotten shorter as you’ve gotten older, another unfairness of age. When she sees you her gloating smile widens. Her skin is uniformly dark as tar, wearing that absurd fuchsia lipstick. You wonder vaguely whether she gets it from human sources, or whether she has brought cosmetics across time, space, and universes, as she did with the remains of her old slave in the helm room of her ship.

“Long time no sea, granddaughter,” she says in her alien tongue. Alternian lacks the words for human family relations, and so she simply borrows them from English. 

“ _Krioh mahara_ , Grandmother,” you reply, “ _ahlak pozgah akusta_.” You of course speak both languages. She did raise you, after all.

Her eyebrows rise. “I’m glad you remember what I’ve schoolfed you, guppy,” she says, “we can do this in a civilized language. ”

“I’ve kept in practice,” you say, “a convenient code that only a few can crack. It kept your lackeys at Crockercorp from reading my private files.”

“That’s my guppy,” she laughs, “always using what I gave you against me. Always so defiant. I’ll miss it. There ain’t no one to speak it with me nowadays.”

You meet her eye. There’s no gloating there, strangely. “Are you saying you didn’t put a hit on John?”

“He fell off a ladder in that shop of his, guppy. I don’t take people out like that.”

There is something almost sad in her eyes. You noticed it sometimes when she raised you, a sort of lonely look in the eyes. 

She would occasionally receive a message from the demon English, and afterwards she would shriek and throw things in impotent rage, and then she would sit on her chair with that look in her eyes. She would always catch you looking at her and say, “do my hair, granddaughter,” and you would be compelled to spend a few hours going through her hair, loosing any knots in that massive mane of hers. 

It was almost like having a mother, sometimes.

“Shall I do your hair, Grandmother?” you ask.

She blinks. Then recognition dawns. She remembers those moments, too. She looks at you steadily, and you look back. You never used to know what went on behind those eyes, never used to know how to predict her rages or her random moments of seeming affection, never knew what she would do to you or John if she decided one of you needed to be punished. She might pick up that trident and impale you any second.

But this time she turns away from you and sits down on the ground, saying, “put your toy away.”

You look down at your rifle and consider shooting her in the back. It wouldn’t kill her, and she would murder you before you reloaded. Maybe if it was a machine gun instead of a bolt action rifle, you could have done it, and it would have amounted to something. Probably not. You want to see Jake again, just once. You’ll play this out and look for an opportunity.

You stow your rifle in your strife deck and sit behind her. You start at the ends, there are so many ends, and your hands fall into habits that are seventy years distant now. Your eyes pick out the signs of potential tangles and work your magic.

“You always taught me it was polite to call ahead when you visit someone,” you chide, “I have had no time to bake you anything.”

“Girl, you’re not too old to get a bass-whoopin’.”

“Why bother? We both know why you’re here.”

She chuckles. “I suppose we do.”

You come to a tangle in her hair that requires some attention, and you both let the words lapse.

“A little fishy tells me that you are o-fish-ally a grandmother too, now.”

“That’s right.”

“I remember," she says, “you used to beg me to tell you about your mother. Your father. ‘Why don’t I have a mommy and daddy like all the other snotty mammal spawn?’ And you cried when I told you what you really are, and where you come from.”

“I remember.”

“Have you told your little spawn about his destiny?”

“He doesn’t know, yet. But he will. He’s already in contact with one of the other children who fell from the sky. And he will be in contact with the ones who will fall soon enough.”

“That so,” she muses, “I didn’t think hu-manatee could manage that sort of time technology just yet. Even you.”

The sunset is in full swing, and the sky above the trees is full of orange and purple, and between them a pink that’s almost fuchsia.

“It wasn’t me,” you say, “an otherworldly gift. From a cherub, in fact.”

She stiffens. “Are you talking aboat—”

“Not him. As far as I know, you are still his sole slave.”

The chittering growl that follows is both nostalgic and dreadful. You are glad you drew it out of her.

“You have a special talent for getting in my gills, guppy.”

You nod, though of course she can’t see you. “Sometimes I think you saw me like one of those heiresses, those other trolls of your caste who you beat down and killed. Or 'krilled'.”

She snorts at the lame fish pun.

“Is that why you’ve come yourself, for me,” you ask, “but not for him? You seemed to have a soft spot for my brother’s clownery. I wonder if he just reminded you of someone from your home planet.”

“Look at you, gillfrond,” she says, “psychoanalyzin’ me.” she sighs. “Maybe. But water boat you? You set up a little empire of your own, building sea-port for your movement and trying to sink me, declaring yourself my anemone. Was that you mimicking those heiresses?”

“Maybe I was just following in my grandmother’s footsteps. I built myself a little empire, just like you built yours. A human mother would be proud.”

“Proud,” she repeats, “proud of what? Of rays-in’ my own enemy? Who would be proud of that?”

You pause to consider how to tell her, how to make her understand. “I am proud of my little Jake. One day he will achieve his dreams and make a name for himself, because I have raised him well. Have you ever wanted to build something that will outlive you?”

She is silent for a moment. “No. I have lived for a long time, girl. I have seen the lega-seas of short-lived suckers dwindle and die after they have passed. I have seen the centuries eat away at castles and at kingdoms. There is no difference between floundering a country that lasts for a century or two and estab-fishing a thousand-year empire if you are only alive to see the first fifty years. Either way it dies.”

Night has fallen. You can almost feel the weight of the night air settle on your shoulders. You feel old. “I forget, sometimes, how unlike a human you really are. Your hair is done.”

“Okray,” she says, “I’ll do you next.”

You stand up, getting on your old, painful knees for what you know is the last time, and walk forward, past her. even seated, her form is as tall as you. You feel her hand stroke your hair, pulling the hair tie out and running a sharp claw between the strands.

“I guess that I should congratulate you on your motherhood, then. And where is the little mammal now?”

“I don’t think he’s ready to meet you yet,” you reply, “but I’ll let him know you stopped by.”

She bundles your hair under her hand, holds it. It feels wrong, that her hands are touching you again. She won’t just snap your neck, though. She likes sticking her fork in everything, everyone. When she reaches back to grab it, you’ll make a break for it. With any luck, she’ll miss a vital area, and you’ll be able to see Jake again before the blood loss kills you.

“Why does human hair turn _white_?” she muses, “it’s such a demonic color.”

You shrug. Your thoughts are on Jake. You take out your GPS. The satellite is down, the device useless, but somehow you just know. He’s come out to find you. Maybe you will be able to see him one more time before the end. It all depends.

“I better go,” you say, dropping the tracker, “Jake will be wanting his dinner soon.”

“That's how you wanna fin-ish, huh.” Her hand leaves your hair and you can hear the crunch of gravel as she rises.

“Very whale,” she says. You can hear the tines of her binatrident as they start to leave the rocky soil. “Run along then.”

**Author's Note:**

> "Toll due, bad dream come true,  
> I lie dead gone under red sky.  
> I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ol' pile of them  
> I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ol' pile of them  
> I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ol' pile of them bones."  
> \--Alice In Chains, 'Them Bones'


End file.
